Reseña de Parable of the Sower por Josh

So here's the quick summary of the book: In the mid-2020s the U.S. government has effectively collapsed. Roving bands travel the highways robbing and pillaging, there's not enough water or food, debt slavery is widespread, the only remaining function of the police is to shake down anyone who gets too close to them. At the same time, a new drug has swept the country. It's called Pyro (a.k.a. “Blaze, fuego, flash, sunfire…”) Its principal effect seems to be to make people go crazy, shave their heads paint themselves bright colors, and start lighting fires.

We learn all of this via the journal entries of the 18-year-old protagonist, Lauren Olamina.

Before getting to what bugged me about the book it might be useful to think a little bit about the function of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction. One of the key functions of the narrative device of the apocalypse is that it allows the author to speculate about what people would be like without many of the social constraints imposed by civilization.

In that sense, the genre is in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher. Hobbes, now famous for having a cartoon tiger named for him, argued that without a government there would be a war of all-against-all. Life would be "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He is often seen as a bit of a downer because he thinks that, under the right circumstances, most people would slit your throat to steal your shoes (or whatever else you might have).

Butler though, IMO, makes Hobbes look like a happy-go-lucky optimist.

The problem is that Butler uses bit characters to move the plot along without seeming to really think through the motives of those characters. Butler's "Pyro" addicts effectively play the role of zombies in the book. They occasionally pop up, to break things, scare some good honest folk just trying to get by, and then (typically) get killed. None of them have names or personalities, and their only motive, as far as can be discerned is to cause chaos.

One powerful thing good fiction can do is make us more empathetic towards other people. The trouble with zombies (and zombie-like figures) is that trying to empathize with or understand them is pointless. The only thing you can do is try to kill them before they kill you. That seems like a way of seeing humans that is both misguided and dangerous and it ultimately detracted quite a bit from this book for me.

How does this make Butler more pessimistic than Hobbes? For Hobbes people were jerks in the state of nature because it made sense to be jerks. Sure, my neighbor would murder me in my sleep, but only because if she didn't she would have no way of knowing that I wouldn't murder her in her sleep. That's definitely a crummy situation, but it can make a certain kind of sense. For Butler's drug-addled zombies though killing and destroying stuff is just how they get their jollies, which seems like a much darker view.

Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood and am taking it out on Butler's book. Who knows?